I corresponded with him in 2012 about Imre Madách, György Lukács, and Sándor Szathmári. He recommended Thomas Mark's translation of The Tragedy of Man, commented negatively on Lukács' role in the Stalinist system and his relation to Hungarian literature, and offered to find someone to translate Lukács' untranslated 1955 essay Madách tragédiája. (No translation ever materialized.) Recently I wrote him inquiring about any known connection or comparison between Frigyes Karinthy and György Lukács. Now I know why he did not respond.

Szegedy-Maszák, Mihály. "The Introduction of Communist Censorship in Hungary: 1945–49," in History of the
Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and
Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Volume III:
The making and remaking of literary institutions (Amsterdam;
Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 2007), pp. 114-125.

There are three essays about Hungary in the third volume. There is
one about Hungarian literary historiography, one about the
historical role of Nyugat, and this:

"The Introduction of Communist Censorship in Hungary: 1945–49" by
Mihály Szegedy-Maszák (pp. 114-125).

The author is a well-known scholar of Hungarian literature. Here we
find a harsh condemnation of Lukács, covering the period from his
return to Hungary in 1949 to his condemnation by the very Stalinists
on whose behalf he acted. He is reported to have been out of touch
with the state of Hungary during and immediately after the war.
Lukács was deep into Communist machinations during the period of the
coalitions government. One such maneuver was an alliance with the
peasant-backed Populist Party, which also served to inject
anti-Semitism into the post-Nazi political arena. We also find
Lukács setting cultural policy, instituting a Communist literary
hegemony involving the defamation of various Hungarian authors past
and present as reactionary. Here we also find Lukács' hostility to
pessimism, an occasion for his condemnation of the putative
rottenness of the past. Numerous writers were silenced.One sees no
indication here of any concession to a dark view of the world as a
result of the Holocaust, something else which seems not to have
affected Lukács very much. Lukács is known for his lifelong
aversion to Hungarian backwardness. The author also claims that
Lukács exaggerated this, distorting Hungarian history. The author
singles out the uncompromising Sándor Márai as the tragic hero and
victim of persecution.

2016-07-26

Yesterday I received the latest issue of the journal Utopian Studies, which is a “special issue on the commemoration of the five hundredth anniversary of Thomas More's Utopia." And what did I find but this article?